Karl Pearson and Adelaide G. Davin 
147 
It will be clear that Bauhin does little more than confirm the error of Vesalius 
by speaking as if the fabellae were constant in man and occurred equally in both 
heads of origin of M. gastrocnemius. To this nearly universal overlooking of 
Eustachius, and to the parrot repetition of the views of Vesalius we owe most of 
the obscurity about the fabellae which followed their discoveiy. In Riolanus, the 
Elder, Osteologia, Pai'is, 1614 (pp. 69, 121, 123, etc. of the Isagogica de ossibus 
Tractatio), we have not been able to find references to the fabellae. There is only the 
passage already cited (see our p. 144, footnote J) with regard to the " in simiarum 
poplite sesamoidea " in Sylvius' commentary on Galen's De ossibus (p. 475) and the 
reference to the fabellae in the apes in the Siiiiiae Osteologia, p. 535. The younger 
Riolanus in his Anthropograplda, Liber v, Paris, 1650, Cap. xliii, p. 333, writes: 
Esternus gastroonimius (sic!) ab externo condylo nascitur... singulis eoruni principiis primus 
Vesalius observavit singula ossiculis sesamena ajiposita, saepius alterum deficit, authore Fallopio. 
Ut laevi lubrieaque sua superficie, dum ossi & musculo interjecta sunt, impediant ne in cruris 
directione musculi atterantur aut ab osse laedantur. 
The direct attribution to Vesalius is here made and Fallopius is cited, not 
Eustachius, as casting some doubt on the constant appearance of at least one of the 
fabellae. ■ 
Gorraeus in 1601, Paaw, 1615, and Laurentius in the same year (also in 1628) 
confine their attention to the sesamoids of hand and foot*. 
In 1632 we find published at Frankfurt Adrian Spiegel's De humani corporis 
fabrica, and on p. 78 under Gastrocnemius externus we read : 
Huius musculi duobus capitibus, queniadmodum Vesalius notat non procul ab exortu sesamoidea 
ossicula tributa sunt. 
In the Tabulae anatomicae of J. Casserius, edited by D. Bucretius (Frankfurt, 
1632), which accompany Spiegel's work, Tabella xxxvill, Fig. 11, professes to give 
a diagram oi gastrocnemius. The figure represei:its the lower limb from knee down- 
wards, the muscle appears to be cut at the two points of insertion and turned back 
from the knee, and S, S, two sesamoids, in it appear to rest on the ground. The 
figure is somewhat obscure, but it is the first professed representation of the fabellae, 
probably largely a product of the imagination (see our Plate I, Fig. 1). Dominicus 
de Marchetti returns to the healthy statement of his own personal experience. He 
rightly holds that, while he himself has not found the fabellae in the many bodies 
he has dissected, he cannot deny their existence. But that they are certainly not 
found in all bodies as Vesalius and Riolanus have asserted f. 
Thomas Bartolinus in his Anatomia reformata, Hagae Com., 1655, returns very 
nearly to the Vesalius legend. In Liber iv. Cap. xxii, De os.sibus sesamoideis, p. 528, 
we read : 
Item bina ossicula in poplite juxta os feinoris, musculorum (duorum pi'iorum pedum moven- 
tium) non tendinibus, sed principiis uniata, qtiae in senibus reperiunter, & aniraalibus siccis, ut 
cervis, canibus et leporibus. 
* There is also no reference that we have been able to discover in the Sylvius of 163.5. 
t Compendium aiiatumicum, Patavii, 1652, p, 167, and Anatomia, Padua, 1652, p. 153. 
